Oh, for the love of Mike.

Most decidedly not about work.

Yes, yes, I know this is my third entry in one day.

My friend E, one of those online friends that I've not yet met, wants to introduce me to a friend of *hers* via email.

Now, then. I don't know how compulsive a matchmaker E is, but I have to wonder. She's never seen me, never talked to me on the phone; all she knows of me comes from some online transactions we've made (she has the coolest business in the world) and our participation on a childfree-themed message board. She knows I have red hair and a large butt. She knows I'm a nurse and that I have an insane cat.

Apparently, this is enough to make her want to offer up a friend of hers as some sort of sacrificial victim.

Dirt.

I am divorced. I am thirty-four years old. I lived with the same person from the time I was twenty-one until I was thirty-three. The entirety of my adult life, therefore, was built around one other person (well, two--my husband and my best pal) until he decided to trade me in on a new model (the best pal).

It was like getting hit with a truck. Twice.

In the six weeks after I left, I got asked out eight times and propositioned twice by patients or patients' family members. The joke around work was that only the neurologically non-intact would look twice at me. The extension of the joke was that anybody who told me I looked nice or was pretty warranted a stat MRI to look for a tumor. The people who decided I was most attractive when I was flailing to stay afloat were emotional remoras, but still. The lesson stuck.

The point of this is...

...that I'm the human version of the dented can of green beans on the shelf at the dollar store. Most of the time I feel okay. Sometimes, like the last few days, I feel damaged and old, a pre-owned person.

What on earth would E be thinking? What in hell?

Reading her email about her friend was enough to make me put down the cup of coffee I'd just made and open a beer instead.

The fear is not that I'm damaged goods. The fear is that somehow I might be the person she sees--funny, talented, smart, kind, and deserving--and that I might have to live up to that.